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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

had made the people parody him, so now the scent turned Lok into
30
the thing that had gone before him.” Not only does Golding’s novel
prompt readers to project themselves into a Neanderthal’s body, but
it does so by exposing the Neanderthal in them: their tendency to res-
onate with embodied language, in the same way that the novel’s Ne-
anderthal protagonist, Lok, resonates with the things and people sur-
rounding him, almost blending into them and losing any sense of self-
other differentiation. 31
This embodied identification with Lok takes on new meanings
as soon as the narrative perspective shifts from the Neanderthal to a
Homo sapiens character, Tuami. The cognitive complexity of modern
humans is announced by the fact that, unlike most Neanderthal char-
acters, whose names are short and monosyllabic (Ha, Nil, Fa, Lok),
Tuami and the other humans in his group have polysyllabic names. 32
Here the world is far more recognizable than it was in the previous
chapters: Tuami’s concepts overlap with our own, bringing the char-
acter’s mental as well as physical world into immediate focus. Con-
sider the following passage, for instance: “[Tuami] waggled the paddle
in the water and the sheets tossed. The sail made a sleepy remark and
then was a entively full again. Perhaps if they squared off the boat,
stowed things properly——? Partly to assess the job and partly to turn
his eyes outwards from his own mind, Tuami examined the hollow
33
hull before him.” Nowhere in the Neanderthal-focalized sections do
we find such a clear articulation of causation (the paddling causes the

30
Golding, 67.
31 In J.M. Coe ee’s The Lives of Animals, the protagonist—Elizabeth Costel-
lo—comments as follows on Ted Hughes’s poems “The Jaguar” and “Second
Glance at a Jaguar”: “In these poems we know the jaguar not from the way
he seems but from the way he moves. The body is as the body moves, or as
the currents of life move within it. The poems ask us to imagine our way into
that way of moving, to inhabit that body”; J.M. Coe ee, The Lives of Animals
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51. My contention is that Gold-
ing does the same by asking readers to inhabit a Neanderthal’s body.
32
I am indebted to Hannah Wojciehowski for this observation.
33 Golding, The Inheritors, 215.

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